Only .000000000000001% of the stars in the universe can be seen from earth. Numbers confuse me, but that looks like 1x10-15, which is called a femto and is three orders of magnitude smaller than pico (1x10-12, or 1 trillion). If my math is right, a femto is 1000 trillion. If this is correct, then we can see 1 one-thousand-trillionth of the stars in the universe! For the sake of comparison, you are approximately .0000000001% of the earth’s population (1/7,100,000,000+). (That’s a million times larger than the “% of visible stars” number.) So, you represent a larger portion of the Earth’s population than the visible stars do of the Universe’s total star population. If this isn’t mind-boggling enough, some scientists estimate that there are 300 sextillion stars. That’s 3 trillion x 100 billion.
All of this gets me to thinking about importance. Some cute kids in a TV commercial for a wireless communications company tell us that more is better. Advantage: stars. We also think that scarcity, or rarity, is more valuable. Advantage: humans.
Those really important people - celebrities, sports stars, titans of industry, and reality TV personalities? They are just like you - 0.0000000001% of the population.
The Desiderata has a line that goes “You are a child of the Universe, No less than the trees or the stars...” In Monty Python’s The Galaxy Song, Eric Idle sings “So remember, when you’re feeling really small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth...”
The point? Some things are bigger than we can possibly imagine. Some smaller. From where we sit, we can’t see the big picture or the small picture - only parts of each. Be amazed. Be humble. Be you.
Reminds me of the William Blake poem.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Beechcreek! It's been a long time since I read Blake. A review of some of his poems turned up a couple of possible references, but I may not be getting the one you mean.
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